Sunday, August 20, 2017

Manza Onsen - 万座温泉

És már itt is vagyok az onsen témával! Japánban igencsak aktív a vulkanikus tevékenység (mint az közismert), aminek van ugyan néhány kellemetlen velejárója (pl. földrengések, cunamik), viszont igen kellemes mellékhatása, hogy a forró gyógyvíz elég könnyen felszínre tud kerülni a föld alól. :) Aminek köszönhetően rengeteg a gyógyfürdő az országban, ráadásul évszázados hagyománya van a fürdőzésnek. A Manza Onsen, ahol eltölthettünk egy estét, meg reggelt, egyike a pici hegyi onsen falvaknak (méretre igazából pár szálloda egymás mellett)...And I'm back with with the onsen topic! In Japan, the volcanic activity is quite lively (well, I guess no surprise there). It causes a few unwanted things, like earthquakes and tsunamis, but it has a very nice side-effect too: thermal water can get to the surface very easily. :) Thanks to that, the country has a lot of hot springs, and these onsens have been very popular for several centuries. Manza Onsen, where we spent one evening and morning the other day, is one of the many tiny onsen villages in the mountains (to be honest, it's not more than a few hotels built alongside each other)...

A mandatory asset of tiny onsen villages in the mountains is the "ryokan", the traditional Japanese inn. They usually have their own thermal baths (so you don't have to go too far), and Japanese-style rooms, that I love! :) We also stayed in one of these. And as usual, some sweets waited for us in the room, along with some tea. There were some sweet beans and "manju", some sweet dumpling, but I don't really know what it's made of... To a European person, it might seem weird that the Japanese traditionally sit on the floor, but in any case, our room had such "chairs" :D and table in it. By the way, there's a reason why you can't see any bed in the pictures: the ryokan's staff got our futons (the traditional mattresses for sleeping on; by the way, the bedding is also called futon :D) out of the wardrobe only later while we were having dinner.

Since I mentioned dinner: if you stay at a ryokan, you can expect to be served a lot of delicious traditional Japanese foods. :) Our case was no different: the staff put so many things in front of us that it barely fit on the table. :D (I was supposed to eat all the food in the pictures all by myself by the way... :D) To be honest, I don't even know the names of most things, but nevertheless, there were all kinds of vegetables, sashimi (raw fish, like sushi without rice :D), wasabi-flavored tofu (that green block in the middle), and some sweet stuff made from peach and a "chimaki" (rice ball wrapped in a bamboo leaf) next to it. On the left, under the green lid, some meat, sweet corn and onions were frying away. Yep, that small device has some room for a small fire under the food, so it fries right in front of you. :) On the right, some coconut milk soup was boiling with the same technique, with some meatballs in it, and some udon noodles (looks like thick spaghetti) and mochi (the sticky rice thingy that chokes people around New Year's), that you had to bathe in the soup a bit before eating. In the back, there were also some fruits for dessert. They tasted quite good too. :)

Vacsora után jött a "főfogás": ekkor lett ugyanis időnk megmártózni a gyógyfürdőben. (Előtte ugyanis még világosban körbenéztünk a környéken.) Ami eléggé másképp működik, mint otthon: előszöris lezuhanyzik az ember előtte, samponnal tusfürdővel, ahogy azt köll, és úgy mehet csak be a fürdőbe (igen, nem medencének hívják). Fürdőruha (vagy bármi más) viselete tilos, mivel beszennyezné a gyógyvizet (van is benne némi ráció...). Aminek egyenes következménye, hogy a férfiak és nők külön fürödnek. :) (Nem volt ez mindig így, csak az utóbbi pár évtizedben szoktak le a közös fürdőzésről a sok visszaélés miatt. ;) ) Értelemszerűen a fürdőben nem nagyon volt lehetőségem fotózni, így a ryokan weboldaláról (japán link) vettem kölcsön pár képet.After dinner, we finally got to the "main dish": that's when we had some time to enjoy the thermal bath itself. (Before dinner, we took a walk outside to view the scenery before it got dark.) The bath works a bit differently than at home: first you have to take a regular shower, with shampoo and body soap, you can only enter the bath afterwards (yep, it's called a bath, not a pool). Wearing swimsuits (or anything else) is prohibited, because the thermal water would get dirty from it (there's some truth to it to be honest...). This means that men and women bathe separately.. :) (It wasn't like this until a few decades ago, when more and more places adopted separate bathing, because too many people were abusing the "situation". ;) ) As a result, I didn't have much chance to take photos in the baths, so I've borrowed some photos from the ryokan's website. (Japanese link)

Besides the indoor bath, there's an outdoor bath too, called "rotenburo". There you can enjoy the scenery while enjoying the bath itself. I feel a bit ashamed, because I didn't find the way to it, although I'm not too sad, since it was raining very heavily (a typhoon went past us that night), so it wouldn't have been much of a good experience anyway. Also, it was pitch black outside by then...

Ja, és mégegy különbség az otthoni gyógyfürdőkhöz képest: a víz
általában olyan forró, hogy kb. 5 percnél többet nem bír ki benne az
átlagember (legalábbis én). De itt a benti fürdőben egész kényelmesen el
lehetett lenni. Igazából csak azért nem maradtam benne kb. negyed óránál tovább, hogy nehogy túl sok vizet veszítsek hirtelen (mivel eléggé megizzad közben az ember, ami miatt a fürdőzés után sem árt egy gyors zuhany). A barátnőm elmondása alapján a kinti fürdő sokkal forróbb volt. Hát majd legközelebb kipróbálom én is...Oh, and one more difference to the thermal baths at home: the thermal water here is usually so hot that the average person (well... me) cannot stay in it for more than 5 minutes. But here, the temperature of the indoor bath was quite comfortable. I didn't stay in it for more than 15 minutes only to make sure that I don't lose too much water in a short time (since you sweat a lot while in there, which also makes a quick shower afterwards quite recommended). According to my girlfriend, the outdoor bath was a lot hotter though. Well, I'll have a go at it too next time...

And to say a few words about the scenery too: before dinner (and the next morning) we went for a walk to see the vicinity, now that we got to visit such a beautiful place. There was a small shrine under a large rock, and a lookout nearby from where you can see most of the village (the first picture in this post was taken from there). Under it, there's a small natural lake with thermal water in it. (Thanks to that, it had a very strong smell. :D) It was also there where we realized one of the disadvantages of the rotenburo: you see, the fact that you can see the scenery from the bath means that you can see the bath and the people in it from the scenery too. :D Of course, your eyes only won't help you much there (my LASIK operation didn't help at all either!), but I think some binoculars could do wonders, in case someone has such fetishes. :D And as at many hot springs, there was a place where the thermal water got to the surface naturally. People weren't allowed to go near it, but I guess that's understandable. Anyway, the steaming hillside on the right is that place. :)

To summarize things, I had a lot of fun in the half day we spent there (we had to go on in the next morning), I wish we could have spent one more day there. Well, spending a few days at an onsen in the mountains in th winter has been in my plans for some time now, I guess I'll enjoy it all the more that time. :) And below this (okay, below the Japanese text below this :D), you can check the photos I took there:つまり、そこで過ごした半日ぐらいはすっごく楽しかった～！（翌朝は残念ながらもう去っていったが…）もう一泊泊まったらよかったのになぁ…まぁ、いいや、冬に山中の温泉郷で数日間のんびりするって計画があったし、その時にもっと満喫してくるね。 :)今なら、下記のリンクで万座温泉で撮った写真が見える、どうぞ：

Many of you have asked me to write about Japan, how's my life here, what's happening to me, etc. That's why I've created this blog, here I'll try to share with all of you every important, unimportant, interesting and boring things that I see / hear / experience here.